Actress Emma Watson, known for her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films, went looking for wool and came away shorn. In her latest interview, she explained that she still loved JK Rowling, the author of the books on which the films are based, despite the bitter public clashes they have had regarding the trans community. But if the actress hoped to soften her relationship with the novelist, the result has been the opposite. In a lengthy post about X, Rowling harshly criticized her and called her a spoiled brat, accustomed to wealth from a young age. "Like so many people who have never experienced adult life without the cushion of fame and money, Emma has so little experience of real life that she is ignorant of the ignorant," she summarized.

The walkers and runners Those who get up early on Sunday to exercise on the banks of the Besòs River are surprised when they see, near the Badalona neighborhood of Artigues, a group of boys and girls running up and down with a PVC stick between their legs and various types of balls in their hands that they throw at their friends, and try to act like a circus, strategically arranged on the grass that exists between the water and the bike path. "Some ask us what we play, others indiscreetly film us and some cyclists who call us 'Harry Potter!'" laughs Brais Costoya, one of the regulars at the Sunday sessions of the Catalan quadball team, a discipline that was born in 2005 from sport and the inspiration of quiddit. It has been practiced in Barcelona for years.

In a very short time, we have witnessed the controversies generated on social networks by the transsexual actress Karla García Gascón and by the writer JK Rowling (referring, precisely, to political issues related to transsexuality). This is not the subject of this article, however. Following these two cases, I would like to explore a problematic and even uncomfortable point, which is the possibility of information control in a technological context such as the current one and within the framework of a democratic society. The social standardization of new technologies is not serving, in general terms, to strengthen the democratic project, but quite the opposite. Pseudoscientific ideas or political proposals openly hostile to democratic principles are in full swing. With a simple mobile phone in hand, anyone can spread large-scale nonsense that will reach millions of people instantly. What is the underlying problem? The democratic system is unviable in the long term with the growing expansion of ideas and attitudes such as those described, but it is also unviable with the sustained control of opinion, that is, with what has always been called censorship. Some believe that the only way to neutralize this risk is to update censorship, that is, to readjust the repressive mechanisms of the state to the new technological scenario. In my opinion, this is going back a long way and, furthermore, it is contradictory: restricting democracy in the name of democracy does not seem like a good idea.